Brand and Marketing

It is important to remember that great brands are deeply rooted in the personal. A brand becomes great when it is personally experienced, consumed, and believed in by people who are willing to personally champion the brand. We encourage you, therefore, to personalize the use of this guide. Consider it a framework upon which to build your own communications. Add to it your own anecdotes, stories, and experiences that exemplify the best of the College, perhaps a testimonial from a parent, a student accomplishment, or a recent team achievement. Select those examples that will resonate well with the particular audiences with whom you interact.

Gettysburg College has established an integrated marketing plan to help support the brand with three key objectives and five key marketing messages:

Marketing Objectives

Enhance the College’s national visibility and academic reputation

Recruit and retain the most academically talented and diverse students

Meet goals for fundraising and engagement of alumni, parents, and friends

Promise Statement

Gettysburg College prepares students to be leaders and active citizens in their professions, communities, nation and the world.

DO GREAT WORK

At Gettysburg College, learning often means doing — doing everything. Talk to our students and ask them what they do. They’ll tell you about their discoveries — how they tried rock climbing, spent a semester in Japan, or ran for Student Senate. They’ll describe how they discovered that they are debaters, biologists, performers, fluent Spanish speakers, peer advisers, and team captains. Talk to them enough and you’ll quickly see that this is a campus of doing.

Why do? Do enough and something happens. Do enough and you start to develop lifelong friends, expertise, mastery, valuable skills, and leadership. There’s a method to all our doing madness at Gettysburg — it’s how we inspire students to do well and with passion, to do with excellence and purpose, and to strive to be great.

Why be great? Because there’s serious work to be done. In November of 1863, Abraham Lincoln came to Gettysburg to honor those who had died in battle. Lincoln encouraged his audience to look forward and asked for their dedication to the “unfinished work” that was still ahead — the great work of securing and advancing democracy and lifting the nation out of conflict.

The great tasks before us are different. Our world needs a new generation of thinkers and doers who care about making great progress. We need to be inspired by dedicated judges, doctors, scientists, leaders, teachers, mathematicians, entrepreneurs, technologists, managers, artists, and others. At Gettysburg, we believe that the education we provide prepares students to be great and to do great work. Will you dare to reach for something truly great? Do you want to be part of finishing the unfinished work of our age?